The new U.S. envoy for talks with North Korea met with Pyongyang’s ambassador to the United Nations last week, but the brief bilateral session was not an “alternative” to multinational efforts to resolve the nuclear standoff, the State Department said yesterday.
Joseph DeTrani, a longtime CIA officer who most recently headed operations in East Asia and Europe, traveled to New York on Thursday to meet with an international consortium charged with the now-suspended construction of light-water nuclear reactors for North Korea.
“Mr. DeTrani also made a brief introductory call on Ambassador Pak Gil-son, North Korea’s permanent representative to the U.N.,” State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters.
He rejected suggestions that the United States was engaging in a direct dialogue with the communist state while trying to convene a second round of six-party talks, to also include China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.
“DeTrani emphasized the importance of the six-party framework and the centrality of the six-party framework,” Mr. Ereli said. “There is no way … anyone should take away from this the impression that somehow it’s an alternative to, or a diversion from, the multilateral handling of this problem.”
In Seoul, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun today called for patience in the search for an end to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and said a U.S. unofficial visit to the communist state’s nuclear facility at Yongbyon last week would help dialogue succeed.
“I have no details yet on the results of the visit,” Mr. Roh told a news conference at the presidential Blue House compound.
“The U.S. effort to make the visit is meaningful and so is the North Korean effort to let the visit take place.”
China, which hosted the first six-party meeting in August, has been trying to get both the United States and North Korea to agree to an initial draft of a joint statement to come out of the session.
The Bush administration has refused to consider any proposal on the North’s nuclear program that is not verifiable and irreversible, but Pyongyang has so far resisted.
Fu Ying, director for Asian affairs at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, met yesterday with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and other administration officials to discuss the status of the talks.
“We hope that we should be able to resume six-party talks as soon as possible,” she told reporters as she was leaving the State Department, adding that no date has been set yet. “We’d like to prepare well.”
Mr. DeTrani, who was appointed to his current position last month, will be the U.S. representative to the international consortium, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO).
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